We are part of the Open Source Software movement, focused specifically on handheld and wearable computers. Our goal is to encourage and facilitate the creation of open software solutions for use on handheld computing platforms. We welcome participation and sponsorship by individuals, groups and companies seeking to further this goal. Our primary sponsor is the Hewlett-Packard Company.

GBIOS was developed and released under the GPL by us as a service to the embedded community. It makes a great counterpart to the Linux OS, giving developers the option of completely open source software throughout their system.

Join over 10,000 developers who have downloaded a free Linux Board Support Package (BSP) for the most popular architectures and from the industry’s leading manufacturers. Written under the GNU General Public License,for ARM - MIPS - PowerPC - SPARC - Super H - XScale - x86

BIOS means Basic Input Output System. BIOS is actually firmware, the software that is programmed into a ROM (Read-Only Memory) chip built onto the motherboard of a computer. BIOS is what makes the system run an initial Power-On Self-Test of the computer, initialize circuits, load the boot program from the boot disk, and then handle low-level I/O to peripheral controllers such as keyboard and display.

OpenBIOS is a free portable firmware implementation. The goal is to implement a 100% IEEE 1275-1994 (Referred to as Open Firmware) compliant firmware. Among its features, Open Firmware provides an instruction set independent device interface. This can be used to boot the operating system from expansion cards without native initialization code. It is OpenBIOS’ goal to work on all common platforms, like x86, Alpha, AMD64 and IPF. With its flexible and modular design, OpenBIOS also targets embedded systems, where a sane and unified firmware is a crucial design goal and reduces porting efforts noticably.Open Firmware is found on many servers and workstations and there are several commercial implementations from SUN, Firmworks, CodeGen, Apple, IBM and others.